[Xmca-l] Re: Indigenous Australian English
Andy Blunden
andyb@marxists.org
Fri Mar 15 17:21:25 PDT 2019
I think Elizabeth's message was to the point. Thanks Elizabeth,
Greg, it is not about Aboriginal languages. It is an
innovation which indigenous people have introduced into
English and is limited to a small range of concepts and
which, as Elizabeth says,"emphasise the authoritative power
of the concept itself."
Andy
------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden
http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
On 16/03/2019 10:34 am, Greg Thompson wrote:
> Andy,
>
> Not sure if this gets at what you're describing but Whorf
> deals quite extensively with the tendency of English to
> make processes into things. His classic piece on this
> addresses the way that English (speakers) can turn
> processes like lightning or waves or even time itself into
> countable nouns and how this might affect the way that we
> understand the world around us (esp. time). Really
> fascinating stuff and not unrelated to Vygotsky's idea of
> semiotic mediation (as an old paper by John Lucy pointed
> out a long time ago).
>
> I wish I knew more about the aboriginal Australian
> languages and could point more toward the kinds of things
> that you are talking about but I'm no linguist and most of
> what I know are restricted to the differences in
> directional terms as compared to English - cardinal vs.
> relative (and I happened to be teaching this two days ago
> - or should I say "two nights have passed since I taught
> this").
>
> Cheers,
> greg
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 15, 2019 at 7:00 AM Elizabeth Fein
> <nickrenz@uchicago.edu <mailto:nickrenz@uchicago.edu>> wrote:
>
> This conversation is also making me think of a
> recently emerging option at least in English
> vernacular (I don't know if this is showing up in
> other languages): dropping the preposition "of" before
> an abstract noun in order to emphasize the
> authoritative power of the concept itself in the
> absence of any specific manifestation. (i.e.
> "...because /science/" or "because /reasons/"). This
> is a bit different of course because it is a
> deliberate grammatical modification to an existing
> form that calls attention to itself as such.
>
> Best,
> Elizabeth
>
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 15, 2019 at 8:37 AM David Kellogg
> <dkellogg60@gmail.com <mailto:dkellogg60@gmail.com>>
> wrote:
>
> I think it means that Australians are leading the
> way into a future without articles. Actually, very
> few languages use an article system; as you know,
> Russian does not, and neither does Chinese,
> Korean, Tibetan or Turkish.
>
> As you point out, English doesn't always use
> articles either. When we embed singular nouns in
> prepositional phrases, the use of the article
> tends to depend on the meaning. Compare "in the
> morning" with "at night", or "at weekend" with
> "over the the weekend", "down town" with "down the
> street", etc. The usual analysis is that "at
> night" functions mostly as an adverb ("nightwise")
> while "in the morning" is a minor verb (i.e. a
> verb with no subject but an object). "I go home",
> "I speak language" and "I spent two weeks in
> hospital/jail/church" can be analyzed in much the
> same way.
>
> I find it useful to think of articles as part of a
> whole range of prenominal modifiers that go from
> deictic to defining. So for example when my
> student writes "My mom had to have an
> urgent C-section surgical operation" the "an" part
> is maximally orienting but minimally defining (it
> just means I am orienting towards it as
> an instance of something but it doesn't say what
> it's an instance of), the "urgent" part is
> somewhat less orienting and more defining, the
> "C-section" part is classifying, and therefore
> more defining still, until we come to the part
> that is maximally defining and minimally
> orienting, "operation". Not only nominal groups
> but verbal groups obey this rule ("had to have",
> where "had" is tensed because it is orienting and
> locates the speaker in time but "to have" is
> untensed and simply defines the nature of the
> process). Whole clauses can also be seen this way
> ("My mom" is the deictic part of the clause and
> "operation" is the defining part).
>
> Not all languages do this, because not all
> languages need to. So for example Russian doesn't
> require this kind of rigid order. Because of those
> pesky cases, so hard for Russian students to
> master, it is always clear who does what to whom
> by what means, and the order simply doesn't
> matter. Same is true in Latin. This is why I think
> you miss the point a little when you speak of "a
> perizhivanie" vs. "perizhivanie". That's not how
> you think in Russian.
>
> dk
>
>
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> New Article;
>
> David Kellogg (2019) THE STORYTELLER’S TALE:
> VYGOTSKY’S ‘VRASHCHIVANIYA’, THE ZONE OF PROXIMAL
> DEVELOPMENT AND ‘INGROWING’ IN THE WEEKEND STORIES
> OF KOREAN CHILDREN, British Journal of Educational
> Studies, DOI: 10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200
> <https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200>
>
> Some e-prints available at:
>
> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/GSS2cTAVAz2jaRdPIkvj/full?target=10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200
>
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 15, 2019 at 8:57 PM Andy Blunden
> <andyb@marxists.org <mailto:andyb@marxists.org>>
> wrote:
>
> While we have the attention of some linguists
> .... Indigenous Australians have a way of
> using certain specific words, for example,
> country, culture, language, community, which
> in English we usually use with a personal
> pronoun, as in "I can speak your language," or
> article, "is this the country you come from?"
> as if they were countable nouns, but which
> Indigenous Australians use without an article
> or personal pronoun, as in "I went to country"
> or "when I speak language ...," much like the
> word "home" which can be used without the "my"
> or "your."
>
> This usage conveys a meaning which is
> generally understood, but is used only in
> relation to the Indigenous people. I
> understand it. But I find it hard to put into
> words what is actually being done when words
> are used like this. I use words like "science"
> or "religion" in the same way, I guess. What
> does it mean linguistically??
>
> Andy
>
> --
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Andy Blunden
> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
>
>
>
> --
> Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
> Assistant Professor
> Department of Anthropology
> 880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
> Brigham Young University
> Provo, UT 84602
> WEBSITE: greg.a.thompson.byu.edu
> <http://greg.a.thompson.byu.edu>
> http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
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